'ATLAS' Is Turning Out To Be One Of The Most Fumbled Launches In Video Game History

It debuted at The Game Awards just two weeks ago, ATLAS, a new survival pirate MMO from the creators of ARK, which would feature 40,000 players on a server and immediately drew comparisons as “what Sea of Thieves should have been.”

The game went from announced to “ready to launch” in early access in about a week, but despite an original release date of December 11, here we are three days before Christmas and the game has been delayed about four times since.

While we have certainly seen problematic game launches in the past with servers overloading and what not, what’s been happening here with ATLAS has been a new level of incompetence I haven’t seen before.

Among all the delays there have been, none has been worse than the Twitch livestream on December 19 which had tens of thousands viewers watching a countdown timer to launch only to have…nothing happen for an hour after the clock hit zero, and then to have the developer come out and say the game was delayed.

ATLAS

ATLAS

Today, they are still trying to get this thing online some way, some how. Reportedly the first rollout is going to be a “special branch” of the game just for content creators which will not save their progress, which has not gotten many content creators terribly enthused about that prospect. It was supposed to go live yesterday, but here we are this morning to a new tweet that the “build” is still being worked on and should be ready in five hours. Hopefully. Maybe. Who knows, really?

We're still working on a build. We will let you know when we have something more concrete, we think it will take at least 5 hours. Check back in the morning for another update.

Video games are delayed in this industry all the time, but the difference here is that not only has ATLAS been delayed multiple times in two weeks, it’s often being delayed after the window it was supposed to be live. At this point, many fans are literally just telling the team to go home for Christmas, announce that it will be delayed for several weeks or so, and try again later.

This current set-up of announcing dates and times only to change them at the last second or even after the game was supposed to go live has turned ATLAS into a meme already. Past ARK players are collectively saying that we should have expected this from a developer who has run into these kinds of problems before, but to outside observers this seems extremely unusual, and whatever momentum this game had coming out of The Game Awards has been severely curtailed by this botched attempt at a launch. An early access launch, no less.

The current ATLAS home page, still promising release yesterday

ATLAS

I agree that the ATLAS teams should just call it a day and go home for the holiday and try to sort this out again later. At this rate they’re going to launch this thing on Christmas Eve after six more delays and this current process is doing nothing but continue to harm the game. Stop announcing dates and times, figure out internally what it’s going to take to actually get this thing online, and come back in 2019 and get it done.